Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Weight of Glory

 

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which,if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.  All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations.  There are no ordinary people.  You have never talked to a mere mortal.  Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.  But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 1941

"The world would be better off if people tried to become better, and people would be better if they stopped trying to become better off.  For when everyone tries to become better off, nobody is better off. But when everyone tries to become better everyone is better off."

Peter Maurin, Better and Better Off

"What we would like to do is change the world— make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And to a certain extent, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute— the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor in other words, we can to a certain extent change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world."

Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker, June 1946

"At bottom, what should you do to avoid being an idiot or a swine?  Merely this: you should do something great, you should become resigned to the fact that you will seem ridiculous to a race of janitors and bureaucrats if you are to enter the service of Splendor.  Then you will know what it means to be the friend of God. The Friend of God!   I am on the verge of tears when I think of it."

Léon Bloy, The Secret of Léon Bloy by Jacques Maritain, 1912

"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God.  Thereafter, any attack even on the least of men is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all.  Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1937

The equity markets are on a pause, waiting for some news, or earnings from Nvidia. 

Gold and silver were off a bit.

The Dollar was flat.

VIX continued to wallow down into a dull complacency.

Let's see what tomorrow brings.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Simply Murder

 

"A thriving upper class accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings, who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings,to slaves, to instruments.  One cannot fail to see in all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

"As a very young man, and it seems so long ago, I spent some time walking with those who spoke out against injustice.  Later, as a grown man, I stood in the same dark cells of the Mamertine Prison in Rome, where Paul and Peter were imprisoned, and where Paul wrote his second letter to Timothy, a letter from jail, where he was held by the power of an empire that, at that time, ruled the world.

And I walked along some of the paths in the catacombs, the hidden places of the early believers who did not yet even have the name of Christians, but simply called their beliefs 'the good news' and 'the Way.' And they loved one another, and watered the roots of their faith with the blood of martyrs.

We are travelers through history, although slowly, one step, one day at a time.  But we are in it, in history, and we play our part of it.  It is not something distant, but real.  This is our moment.   And Christ calls us to follow him now, even as he did then, in those days when he walked the earth, when he was a passing figure in the crowd, and beckoned with a simple wave of his hand, and the sound of his voice.

Now as an old man I see a nation that has been given great power, and has come once again to a decision point, where it may choose for the truth, or take a darker road.  And it seems as though we have already turned away from the truth, and are going down that fateful path, the way of greed and fear and above all pride, and the worship of worldly power for its own sake, cleverness, deception and the arrogance of money, in our willful blindness.  And may God have mercy on us, and our children and our grandchildren, if we do."

Jesse, Unfulfilled Dreams: A Tension At the Heart of the Universe, 5 April 2012

"For the general reader, one or two chapters should suffice to convince them that the authors have emphatically proven their points. And to grasp these points and fully realize that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by elements of his own government led by the CIA and that the mass media were accessories after the fact to this terrible crime – to let this really sink in – well, nothing is more important in understanding what is going on today...

I do not agree that we need a new investigation. The facts have long been clear: President Kennedy was assassinated by the U.S. National Security State led by the CIA. What we need to do is draw the implications from that fact. They are profound."

Edward Curtin, Review: The JFK Assassination Chokeholds, 16 May 2024

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

Ephesians 6:12

Stocks managed to have a somewhat positive day led by big tech.

The rally overall seems tired and overextended.  But still seemingly in the driver's seat.

Gold and silver soared overnight in Asia, with silver going up limit in Shanghai.

But the familiar story is the kind of paper games that come into play in London and New York.

This is unsustainable, but very stubbornly supported by the Western financial powers.

VIX continues to bounce near recent lows.

Madness.  Murder and madness.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - In Service to Naked and Arbitrary Power

 

"With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made ‘legal.’  Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.”

Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, April 2010

“Oh where is the noble face of modesty, or the strength of virtue, now that blasphemy is in power and men have put justice behind them, and there is no law but lawlessness, and none join in fear of the gods?”

Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis

"Public opinion has become the object of intensive efforts to control, manage, manipulate, and increasingly intimidate.  In political, military, economic realms, power becomes, in varying degrees, uneasy before the suspected opinions of masses, and, accordingly, opinion-making becomes an accepted technique of power-holding and power-getting.  The minority electorate of the propertied and the educated is replaced by the total suffrage— and intensive campaigns for the vote.

As the scale of institutions has become larger and more centralized, so has the range and intensity of the opinion-makers’ efforts.  The means of opinion-making, in fact, have paralleled in range and efficiency the other institutions of greater scale that cradle the modem society of masses.  Accordingly, in addition to their enlarged and centralized means of administration, exploitation, and violence, the modern elite have had placed within their grasp historically unique instruments of psychic management and manipulation.

The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability.  Those who sit in the seats of the high and the mighty are selected and formed by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity, which prevail in their society.  Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility.

Of course, there may be corrupt men in sound institutions, but when institutions are corrupting, many of the men who live and work in them are necessarily corrupted. In the corporate era, economic relations become impersonal— and the executive feels less personal responsibility. Within the corporate worlds of business, war-making and politics, the private conscience is attenuated— and the higher immorality is institutionalized.  It is not merely a question of a corrupt administration in corporation, army, or state; it is a feature of the corporate rich, as a capitalist stratum, deeply intertwined with the politics of the military state.

A society that is in its higher circles and on its middle levels widely believed to be a network of smart rackets does not produce men with an inner moral sense; a society that is merely expedient does not produce men of conscience. A society that narrows the meaning of 'success' to the big money and in its terms condemns failure as the chief vice, raising money to the plane of absolute value, will produce the sharp operator and the shady deal.  Blessed are the cynical, for only they have what it takes to succeed.

America - a conservative country without any conservative ideology-appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality."

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, Oxford Press, 1956

"When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven mad by fear and horror, and when chaos has become the supreme law, then the time for the empire of lawlessness will have come."

Fritz Lang, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1933


Stocks were parked today, after a week of substantial gains.

Gold and silver rocketed higher, with silver putting in a short-scorching rally.

The Dollar was nominally unchanged.

There are big events on the move behind the scenes.  

For now we only feel their tremors.

And when history unfolds, does it matter?

After even the most shocking of events what remains is the rewriting of history and the forced suppression of dissent from the prevailing narrative. 

For those who manage the conversations and control the evidence, the truth is a very malleable thing— at least for those who would be as gods.

Need little, want less, love more.  For those who abide in love, abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.